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Educational attainment and drinking behaviors: Mendelian randomization study in UK Biobank

Molecular Psychiatry volume 26, pages 4355–4366 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Educational attainment has been associated with drinking behaviors in observation studies. We performed Mendelian randomization analysis to determine whether educational attainment causally affected drinking behaviors, including amount of alcohol intakes (in total and various types), drinking frequency, and drinking with or without meals among 334,507 white British participants from the UK Biobank cohort. We found that genetically instrumented higher education (1 additional year) was significantly related to higher total amount of alcohol intake (inverse-variance weighted method (IVW): beta = 0.44, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.40–0.49, P = 1.57E−93). The causal relations with total amount and frequency of alcohol drinking were more evident among women. In analyses of different types of alcohol, higher educational attainment showed the strongest causal relation with more consumption of red wine (IVW beta = 0.34, 95% CI 0.32–0.36, P = 2.65E−247), followed by white wine/champagne, in a gender-specific manner. An inverse association was found for beer/cider and spirits. In addition, we found that 1 additional year of educational attainment was causally related to higher drinking frequency (IVW beta = 0.54, 95% CI 0.51–0.57, P = 4.87E−230) and a higher likelihood to take alcohol with meals (IVW: odds ratio (OR) = 3.10, 95% CI 2.93–3.29, P = 0.00E + 00). The results indicate causal relations of higher education with intake of more total alcohol especially red wine, and less beer/cider and spirits, more frequent drinking, and drinking with meals, suggesting the importance of improving drinking behaviors, especially among people with higher education.

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Acknowledgements

The study was supported by grants from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (HL071981, HL034594, and HL126024), the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (DK091718, DK100383, and DK078616), the Boston Obesity Nutrition Research Center (DK46200), and United States–Israel Binational Science Foundation grant 2011036. LQ was a recipient of the American Heart Association Scientist Development Award (0730094N). All investigators are independent from funders.

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  1. Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, Tulane University, 1440 Canal Street, Suite 1724, New Orleans, LA, 70112, USA

    Tao Zhou, Dianjianyi Sun, Xiang Li, Hao Ma, Yoriko Heianza & Lu Qi

  2. Department of Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA

    Lu Qi

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All participants provided written informed consent before participating in the UK Biobank study.

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The UK Biobank study was approved by the North West Multi-Centre Research Ethics Committee and the Biomedical Committee of the Tulane University (New Orleans, Louisiana) Institutional Review Board. The study was conducted in accordance with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki.

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Zhou, T., Sun, D., Li, X. et al. Educational attainment and drinking behaviors: Mendelian randomization study in UK Biobank. Mol Psychiatry 26, 4355–4366 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-019-0596-9

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